#162 -Sleep in the Gilded Age: If You Know Your History
Update: 2025-07-28
Description
In our modern world of blue light and burnout, it’s easy to forget that sleep has always been shaped by the forces of its time. In this episode, we travel back to the Gilded Age—a period of dazzling progress, deep inequality, and curious beliefs about sleep. In thenis episode, we will:
- Explore how medical professionals in the late 19th century understood sleep—and misunderstood insomnia
- Learn what physicians were prescribing to sleepless patients in an era of opium, electricity, and moral fatigue
- Contrast the sleep practices of the working poor and the wealthy elite, and how each class shaped our modern assumptions
- Examine the “rest cure,” neurasthenia, and other diagnoses born from a world grappling with industrial change
- Discover the surprising technologies and bedding innovations that started appearing in Gilded Age bedrooms
- Reflect on how beliefs from this gilded era still echo in our bedrooms today—from sleep hygiene to the fear of lying awake
Produced by: Maeve Winter
More
- Twitter: @drchriswinter
- IG: @drchriwinter
- Threads: @drchriswinter
- Bluesky: @drchriswinter
- The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child
Thanks for listening and sleep well!
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